Posts Tagged ‘Art’

As I mentioned in our post about the food in Singapore, there are indoor markets with giant food courts all over the city. Since we’re not big on shopping we had mostly just focused on the food section, but after a delicious meal one day we decided to take a wander through the rest of the market.

We were in luck for our fabric project! One of the first stalls we came across had some gorgeous designs on nice cotton fabric. Perfect for quilting and so much easier than our searches in many of the other countries! We had trouble deciding what to buy as there were lots of pretty patterns. In the end we picked three that were thought were unusual or a bit distinctive. Very happy with these ones!

Sorry, this post is a little out of order since it was before we got to Singapore. I still want to show of our fun Malaysian fabric though!

Our time in Malaysia was so jam-packed with action that we hadn’t had a chance to search for the fabric right up until the last minute. After a pretty damp day in Borneo we were all set to fly back to Kuala Lumpur and head out to Singapore the next morning. As we pulled in to the airport I realized that this might be our last chance to get any fabric from Malaysia!

Of course, there wasn’t a fabric shop at the airport, but they did have a great two for the price of one deal going on sarongs! This meant that we wound up with much more fabric than we really needed, but the patterns are awesome and will definitely remind me of that part of the world. And maybe we will even keep one of them as a sarong.

In between all of our temple watching we had a chance to explore the town of Siem Reap. We were extremely lucky because the town had suffered from some serious flooding the week before we arrived. It was bad enough that a couple of people died and there were still sand bags and lots of water about when we got there.

Flooded street - right outside our hostel!

The city and our hostel (Rosy Guest House) were drying out and recovering from all of the water. It didn’t affect us too much though and we considered ourselves really lucky to have decent weather for temple viewing.

Siem Reap is a pretty touristy place. There are lots of good restaurants (a good thing), but lots of people hassling you to buy stuff (and they are PUSHY here). Honestly, it got pretty tiring constantly being shouted at to buy things.

Well, after a bit of a story behind the Hong Kong fabric, the Thailand fabric was very straightforward. Basically, there were lots of cute shops on Koh Tao, the island where we learned to SCUBA and one day we were walking along the street and noticed some absolutely gorgeous fabric in one. Seriously, I think this is my favorite so far. Totally unique and so, so beautiful. We snatched it right up and shipped it off to my mom.

And here it is!

A little wrinkled, but you get the idea...

Close up of the flowers

And just because they are adorable, here’s another picture of the island dogs sleeping on the beach. They have their own little sleeping spots!

Buying fabric in Hong Kong turned out to be a bit of a different experience than anywhere else we’ve been so far. We looked up where we might be able to buy some fabric and found a whole lot of shops all in one area of town. Hong Kong has a great subway system, so we took a ride over there and this is what we found:

I can’t believe I forgot to post this with all of the Turkey posts! But better late than never, so here is the lowdown on Turkey’s contribution to our wedding quilt. We knew that we wanted to look for fabric in Istanbul’s famous Grand Bazaar. You can read about the rest of our shopping trip here.

Even though Istanbul is known to have amazing textiles we had an epic quest trying to search for something that would be appropriate for use in a quilt. In general the fabric we would like to find would be made of cotton or something similar, be a strong, thin fabric that isn’t stretchy, see through, or too coarse. In the USA you can buy fabric specifically designed for quilting, but this is not the case in most other countries.

The first thing we found that would maybe have worked was a table runner. We would have needed to cut it up and only wanted a small bit of it. It was expensive though and we ultimately decided that we could probably do better. It wasn’t easy though and even our final choice will be quite a challenge for my mom to put it into the quilt with so many other different types of fabric.

And here is our choice!

Turkey Fabric

It is a pashmina made of cashmere. We loved the pattern and the colors and it is incredibly soft. Perhaps it can even be used in one big piece on the back of the quilt or it will just mean that there are little soft patches on the front!

Not so much to note about this one. In our walking around Sofia we passed by a fabric shop. There were very few bits of fabric that were suitable for quilting, but we managed to buy one we liked from a very nice lady who spoke no English whatsoever. Thank goodness for sign language!

Our second day in Prague was laundry day. The hostel told us about two possible laundromats, so we set off for the closest one first. Could not find it. We found the address, but there was definitely not a laundromat there. So we headed on to the second one. Also could not find it. Went to a hotel and asked them if they knew of a close place to do laundry. They gave us directions to the one we were looking for, and we headed over. Out of business. BUT, there was a fabric shop right across the street – which was closed.

We were about an hour and a half into this project by now and had no other leads. So we went and had cake.

We were lucky in Finland, since we had a local guide and she was able to take us directly to a fabric shop! Actually, it wasn’t quite that simple. We thought it would be nice to get some Marimekko fabric, since it is a well known Finnish designer and I really like a lot of the patterns. However, when we arrived at the shop we found out that for a tiny little piece of this fabric we would be paying almost 20 Euros and we just couldn’t bring ourselves to do that.

So we set off again and found a different fabric shop and there we found this beauty.

Finland fabric

The colors seem especially appropriate to me since blue and white are the colors of the Finnish flag, but also it really strikes me as a place of water and ice. Another fabric success!